From the earliest days, man has dreamt of flying. One hundred years ago today, on 17 December, 1903, at Kitty Hawk, a remote fishing village in North Carolina, Wilbur and Orville Wright changed the world forever when they flew the first airplane.
The first flight by Orville Wright, at Kill Devil Hill, lasted only twelve seconds and traveled just 120ft — a little over half the length (225ft) of a modern Boeing 747 — but it was the first time that man had achieved a controlled, powered flight in a machine that was heavier than air.
As Orville later wrote in his diary: although the flight lasted just twelve seconds, it was the first time that a piloted machine had risen into the air under its own power, moved forward without losing speed, and "landed at a point as high as that from which it started." The aviation age had begun.
Little did the Wright brothers' know how significantly their invention was to change the world. Less than sixty-six years later, on July 20, 1969, another American, Neil Armstrong, would step onto the dusty surface of the Moon with the words: "That's one small step for [a] man, one giant leap for mankind."
And eight billion miles above us, the Voyager spacecraft (launched in 1977) enters into deep space as it travels beyond the outer edge of the solar system...
But no matter how high we fly, we cannot escape birth, death, old age, disease...
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